


like a cold water among broken reeds

by gogollescent



Category: Fate/Zero
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:19:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2807411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kariya and Sakura, doing what they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Erin_C](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erin_C/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Erin_C! This is a pretty weird gift, I'm afraid--not quite a fix-it fic, and not quite an exploration of canon. But hopefully it provides an interesting alternate scenario, as well as digging into Sakura and Kariya's bond. I had a _lot_ of fun working with your prompts; I wish you the best possible end-of-year season.

“I can't sleep.”

It's the first thing she's said to him since he began his training. Of course, they've both been busy.

“Hello, Sakura,” says Kariya, attempting a smile. She's hanging off the doorframe, gone up to the balls of her slight feet; long, bony little-girl arms tremble to support her. “It's good to see you. Would you like—”

He stops short, strangled by impossible questions. _What is it, a bad dream?_

“Would you like Uncle Kariya to tell you a story?”

Sakura lets go of the wall and catches herself without stumbling, although her heel makes a hard sound against stone. She takes a breath. With her toes angled inward, along an unmarked central line, and one knee sharply bent—she looks like a runner preparing to charge.

Then she straightens, and hobbles over wordlessly. The scars on her legs are dark and raised. When she sits next to his head, it is with a ghost of the old peremptory neatness; but she seems daunted by the fact that he doesn't shift to make room. Kariya has to fling out his arm to stop her from sliding right off again.

“You can stay. I just can't—I can't get up for a little while, because—”

The sudden emptiness in her face is worse than misery. She smooths her smock over her knees, and settles.

He's glad, at least, that Zouken gave her the freedom of the house. Also clothing, although the dress is a pale, moth-eaten antique. He tries not to think about how much pain she's in. His terror won't relieve it. Negotiating with his father for Sakura's future, Kariya found a ruthlessness he'd last employed when he forced himself to dance at Aoi's wedding. With Sakura, however, he needs a different strain of unconcern: kindly, measured solicitude, as disconnected from the scope of her troubles as a slap would be, or a splash of water. More than that, and he'll only add to the storm. What language can a child use to make sense of despair? She has been transported to a world where trivialities like “day” and “night” are—if not vanished, then broken, smashed into a thousand squirming parts. A swarm of new seconds irrevocably felt; each minute elongated, fattened on raw discomfort.

“Uncle?”

Her voice is still hoarse. So is his. _On the fourth day..._

“I'm sorry. A story, is it?” She likes the scary ones, as he recalls. “Well. Once, there was a woman who knew that she would die. She wished to be buried under a juniper tree; but before that, she prayed for a child...”

The changed, depthless violet eyes—in the pit, she looked more like herself.

But she listens to his fairy tale with familiar intensity. What did Aoi say to him? The clan of a magus cannot expect to enjoy ordinary happiness. For years he thought Sakura and Rin were happy, because they played with such single-minded humorlessness at the park. But even then Sakura had an expression she saved for stories about rescue or departure: a closed, discerning smile, like a jeweler working to keep the shock from his eyes, as he fingers a pearl.

Kariya's plan requires that he win the Holy War. It hasn't escaped his notice that he will likely have to kill Sakura's father to do it. But before this—before tonight—he thought Tokiomi's death was necessary because of things Tokiomi had done. Now he thinks, If from the moment of your birth it is possible you will be traded away for a wish, how can you be happy? Never mind _when_ the blow will fall. Was he happy, unharmed, unused, for fourteen years in Matou Zouken's house? One of his oldest recurring dreams is about braiding wild grass into a ladder. Long before her father sold her, Sakura learned to forage for rope.

And so he was wrong to bank on a resurrection of the old Sakura, quiet and sun-streaked. If that happiness was ever real, it has become corrupt: infected in all its parts by the year that followed after. He must do better. Kill Tokiomi, get the Grail; unhook Aoi, Sakura, and Rin from the whole shining wheel of the great bloodlines' great games. Then, maybe, he can count himself as having saved Aoi's daughter from the basement.

“And when the little girl struck her brother, his head fell off, and she ran away in tears...”

Sakura drifts off before he reaches the part of the story where the teller has to sing. He does so anyway, hoping his flat voice won't disturb her; her head on his chest is an immovable weight, but her breathing remains shallow, ragged, even as her eyes jump like a pulse beneath closed lids. _My mother, she killed me. My father, he ate me. My little sister gathered up my bones..._

There is no rooting out the parasite called time. So what? She will live with it until it kills her; and in the course of that strange life, he trusts she'll do more than be cruelly unmade.

 

“So?” Zouken says, a few days later. “What do you think?”

“Of?”

The cane comes down hard on his knuckles. Since nothing breaks, Kariya supposes he's going to have to take it as a gesture of tolerance, if not approval.

“The girl, fool. Now that she's walking about.”

He inches the skin-bound grimoire he's studying out of the way of further cane-assisted commentary. “I don't think anything.”

“Really? I find her much improved, myself. A bright new model. But maybe you're disappointed that she's been avoiding you...?”

It's true that Sakura hasn't come near him since she woke up curled against his side. He was so deep in the throes of decay by then that he didn't notice her leaving. It's possible his face was what frightened her off, in its avenging rictus. That, or Zouken simply ordered her away from him. “I didn't notice.”

“I bet.” Zouken is starting to grow bored. Kariya never expected the old adages about—getting to know your parents, and appreciating their fallibility—to apply to his father, who is hundreds of years old and full of wasps; but he is, at the very least, discovering that Zouken has _mannerisms_. What once impressed him as inevitable movement, less personal than thunder—the clutching hand, the narrowed eye, the flash of blackened tongue and teeth!—now resolves itself into a range of legible emotion.

And at least running away gave Kariya this: a world to compare Zouken to. A definite frame of reference from which to confidently say—that paperlike hide, that laughter: that is more than mere power and age. There is nothing there that could be cleanly loved, or owed allegiance.

“Kariya,” Zouken says, “you're distracted. Perhaps I should have her brought here now. I'm sure, between the three of us, we could find something to encourage you.”

“...She needs new clothes.”

He ignores Zouken's sucking, satirical version of a scandalized inhale. “You wanted my thoughts, right? I think you can't put her in Shinji's old nightgowns forever.”

“So you do have opinions! It's just like old times.” Zouken puts a finger to one side of his sunken nose. “Now that you've gotten that off your chest, I expect you to work twice as diligently. And—” his other hand flies up to forestall Kariya's curt response “—if you finish before sunset, I'll send you out to do a little shopping. While you're still fit to be seen in public, eh?”

Which is how Kariya ends up in a car with Byakuya, being chauffeured to the nearest mall. Impossible to say whether Zouken thinks Kariya's going to run off if let out without a guardian, or whether he just doesn't trust Kariya not to wreck the car out of spite. Byakuya is twitchier at the wheel than he used to be. Kariya remembers his brother as being a sedate, if disagreeable, companion; he also remembers him sober. Perhaps he shouldn't assume he knows anything about Byakuya anymore.

But some of the old staid carefulness has survived the last ten years. Kariya realizes after browsing for an hour that he has only the faintest sense of what it is young girls actually wear: and Byakuya, against all expectations, is the person who comes to his aid, before any pretty sales assistants can descend. He picks out ribbons, collars, stockings, buckled shoes, and somehow makes the process seem soullessly practical. Which Kariya supposes it is, from Byakuya's perspective. Anything to placate a prodigal little brother and get back to his wine. Still, it makes Kariya think—of Shinji, who almost never shows up in Kariya's wing of the manor; Shinji who Byakuya fusses over with distant, severe care. Set against Byakuya's reserves of cowardly violence, it is all the more striking. Kariya can guess what happened to the mother.

“Thank you,” he says sincerely when they've checked out. Looking through the bagged things in their floppy piles, he could wish for a little more of any shade but purple; but he has to admit that if pushed to suggest alternatives, he would founder on the chancy rocks of 'color matching' and 'trends.'

Byakuya grunts. “I would have done it anyway, you know,” he says, waving at the cart. “Once I was sure—once I knew that she was staying.”

Staying, as opposed to dying underground. But Kariya is conscious as well of an unpleasant suggestion that he has come out here for nothing, that in pushing the issue he only sought to soothe his own pride. “A noble sentiment.”

Byakuya opens his mouth, lets it gape for awhile, and shrugs. It's disappointing, though heady, to discover that his big brother has declared him off-limits; Kariya knows better to expect any feeling from Byakuya besides crude resignation, but once that fatalism had more eventful outlets. It makes him worry about Sakura. A year, he reminds himself. A year and she is free.

“I'm sending Shinji abroad,” Byakuya says.

“Oh?”

“There's a school. He'll be clear of the fighting.”

As if anyone would hold hostage, or long threaten, a circuitless scrap of a boy. The only way Shinji might come to harm in the war is through some bleak coincidence: a stray spell, or an explosion, or perhaps if the city burned down. But accidents can happen at any time, with or without the Grail. Their lives are proof enough of that.

Kariya says, “I'm glad.” He rubs his palms together. “Is it co-ed? Maybe Sakura can go with him.”

There's the poison he remembers, delivered by look and not by hand. “I wish you had never come back here,” Byakuya says. “The Matous could have stayed out of this war. Another sixty years, and I—”

He stops, evidently shocked by his own admission. “And you'll be safely cremated,” Kariya finishes, nodding. “A good ambition to have, for a man of your age.”

Byakuya draws himself up in a concealed, edgeless flinch. “And you,” he says, staring off into the parking lot, with its grid of lightly wind-tossed trees, “you—you could have gone—”

Kariya feels things in his chest moving, like the shadow of the trees' long leaves.

 

They go back to the manor. Byakuya grants him _de facto_ delivery-privileges by wandering off to the kitchen to drink; Kariya heads alone to Sakura's room, his old room, and leans against the door to catch his breath before knocking.

“Come in, Uncle,” says Sakura, after a long pause.

She's sitting on a narrow box-bed he doesn't recognize. Her hands are loosely clasped across her knees. She really is dressed in something that might once have been Shinji's sleepwear, although before that, even, Kariya thinks it was a T-shirt for Fuyuki City's premiere baseball team. “How did you know it was me?” he asks, putting the bags down with a crunch.

“Grandfather doesn't knock.”

He makes a face, because it's that or wince. To his surprise, it works; she almost, hesitantly, smiles, though after a moment it dissolves into something more like amnesiac worry. She has the permanent vagueness of exhaustion, moving as slowly and bluntly as a diver at the bottom of the sea; she too is under enormous pressure, and far from any natural light. It's different from the self-conscious decorum she used to practice in imitation of Aoi. She was still clearly a kindergartener when she curtsied and bobbled—now, she's a child, but it would be harder to guess her true age.

“I brought presents.” He kneels and starts removing items from the bags. Most of the accessories he just lays out on the top of the dresser, but he shakes out one dark dress and holds it up. It looked a little heavy on the rack; in here, however, he can see constellations of gold stabbing through the weave. “Well, Byakuya picked them out, really. I just stood there heckling. But I hope you like them.”

Sakura scoots off the bed with a thump, but doesn't come much closer. He puts the dress aside. “I have something else, too,” he says, remembering. “I got it for you before I knew—”

He reaches into his pocket. The cold press of the bracelet against his leg anchored him for much of that long week in the basement, and has anchored him since; but for most of that time he didn't know what it _was,_ only that it was always there, and clean. Though he should probably change his clothes at some point. He wipes it off on some of the tissue from the store, to be safe.

And Sakura finally does sidle over to take it. She is serious and patient while he pours the chain into her hand.

“It's pretty,” she says. “Oh, thank you.” It gleams like snakeskin, looped across her fingers. He gets up off his haunches, with half a mind to let her investigate her new duds on her own. But he doesn't have a date with Zouken's creatures tonight, and she's—she's still playing with the bracelet, frowning, as though it's a puzzle to be solved.

“Can I sit here for a while?” he asks, hoping somehow to convey honest uncertainty.

“If Uncle wants,” she says, paying him back in the same coin. She is at least indifferent, more than dutiful, and after a moment's thought he gets back down on the floor beside her. In a little while he'll bring his “textbook,” maybe, and study by the window. He'll show her how to work the catch on the chain.

He has in mind the day when he ran away, leaving behind father and powerless brother. It was a straightforward business. He took a different bus than usual after class. Letters, disownment—they came quite a bit after. His things had been packed for months.

It wasn't even a long bus ride. Getting off at the stop nearest the hostel, he paused, duffel bag in hand, to inspect and boldly pity his surroundings. It was an autumn day. The trees were all stripped bare or clattering; people crossed the street in huddled foursomes, to ward off the breeze. None of them could possibly feel as he felt—nervousness a crisp shell for relief. Unlucky to be anyone but Kariya Matou on that barren afternoon, although afterward he sank back into the old, grim doggedness...

 _You could have gone_. He is still going. Maybe Byakuya was right, to imply that his concern for Sakura is selfish. Why shouldn't it be? She helps him. He never intended to come back to this house; but with every day here, every good sacrificed for another, he furthers and strengthens his escape.

 

Magecraft, in addition to being the source of great evil in this world and the basis for some very questionable parenting strategies, is deadly dull. The constant nausea and fatigue from the physical side of his conditioning make this last complaint almost literal; but even without mandibles lodged in his belly, Kariya feels sure that exchange theory would elude him. Prana, mana, sauna. He fantasizes idly about undiscovered cures, despite everything he knows. _After the Grail—_ Maybe if he goes to a really good spa their trained masseuse will beat the bugs out of him. Maybe in a sauna they'd slide right out through the pores, like a letter from a steamed-open envelope.

He's not sure he wants to think of himself as an envelope for worms.

Today he's moved his work to the garage. He kicks open the double doors, and afternoon slings gold across the concrete.

The idea is to get a feel for the spaces of the eventual incantation, the nodes of power. Earlier that morning, he poured out a circle of white paint, not bothering to be exact; now he squints at the cardinal points and wishes he could will them less blobby.

There's a scream from outside. He shades his eyes and looks for a source, somewhere in the spiky vegetation that overruns the driveway.

“Kariya! Kariya!” She runs full-tilt into his midsection, and they both go over. She's silent by the time he lifts her off of him, hair a purple mane; nevertheless, he holds a finger to his lips before going over to slam the doors.

He somehow isn't prepared for the blackness that swallows them. Or perhaps in his perpetual distraction he simply misses—the moment of transition, the waning slice of greenery that would have forewarned his nerves. “Sakura,” he says, after a blind moment, “what frightened you?”

“I... I...”

He fumbles around for the cord on the overhead lamp, but before he can reach it Sakura latches onto his knee with a firm, though tiny, fist. He freezes. “I was walking,” Sakura says. “It was so warm, and nice, I wanted to go and see—I wanted to go to the park. I looked for you.”

It's the most he's heard her say in one breath since— _since_. She was out searching for him? And found...

She's still talking. “I went to the _flowers._ The roses.” As far as he's aware, there are no roses on the Matou estate, but he can imagine some shrubs that might be optimistically mistaken for them. Towards the edge of the grounds, on the west side.

“And then—”

His attention snaps back to her. She was wandering near the wards? There's a reason he hasn't taken her back to that park, and it's not a lack of interest on his part. “What happened?”

“Grandfather was there,” she says. “He came out of the air.”

He can't think of anything to say to that.

Sakura seems to be making little buzzing noises to herself. Dreamily, she adds: “So many wings.”

He reaches down and takes her hand. It only takes a little work to get her to transfer her grip over from the material of his sweatpants. “I can't find the light,” he whispers.

“Oh,” she says. “Really?” She mutters something that sounds terribly guttural for a six-year-old. Their linked fingers start to glow, in veins and lobes of amethyst. He can see the blockages, too: dark translucent masses that move slowly up through flesh.

“...That's really good,” he says, turning his hand over so that the back of it rests against her palm.

“Father taught me,” Sakura says. “It used to look different.”

Yes. A witchlight would be quite another thing for a Tohsaka, clear of body and mind.

Kariya tries not to think his father, popping up like a stepped-on rake whenever Sakura ventures too close to the perimeter. _Wings._ How does _that_ work?

He's almost immune to internal slithering, at this stage. But when a black shape flutters across his wrist, he screams and throws himself backwards. He has a sharp, fully-formed idea of his father all around him, in the dark: revealed at last to be an army rather than a man. He is convinced that he will be devoured, a year ahead of schedule. When she finds the light—when the light comes back on—

He curls up and shuts his mouth, to delay the inevitable, and then—

“It was a moth,” Sakura says, close to his ear. “Uncle. It's all right. Please, wake up...”

A moth?

“The light,” he says, slowly. “The light drew it.”

“Yes.”

“And I'm an idiot,” he says, beginning to laugh. Sakura, solemn, incandescent, looks at him with a mixture of bewilderment and repressed condescension. She didn't really need the garage doors shut to protect her, it occurs to him. This has all been pretty unnecessary, even by his standards.

He's still wheezing when he cracks the left door open, just enough to impale himself and the darkness with a bar of burning sun. He falls backward against the work table, letting slip high chuckles and snorts, and finds with dim horror that the blood is pounding in his ears—his ribcage might be battered apart by that ram. He gasps and hears the knot in his throat. Just how sick am I, he asks himself, if a moment's silly upset can do this? If laughter can tear out his breath at the root.

“Sakura,” he manages, “will you get me some water?”

She slips into the house.

 

When she re-emerges, she has not only a glass of water but a covered pitcher of what looks like Byakuya's special hangover cure, as well as a hot washcloth. No doubt Byakuya told her the pitcher was “medicine.” She stands by forbiddingly while Kariya avails himself of water and rag; the stripe of light across her face shows only a matte expanse of skin, but where the darkness lies thickly, contours of bone and cartilage are picked out in blooming purple.

He thinks of saying—tutor me? She commands her magic with such ease. It would be a little hypocritical to exploit her knowledge of magecraft while insisting that she should be removed from the magi's system; and he doesn't think learning to fluoresce will allow him to summon a Servant. But it would be nice to work together. He could read to her, and she could interpret.

Instead he drinks from the sticky glass, and waits for his body to recover. Sakura acts more or less as if she's forgotten about her encounter with Zouken. She must be getting bored, but she hides it well. She seems reluctant to leave him. It's funny. He didn't know she could be afraid, in that way, thrashing and spitting in her own defense. It's faded now, along with the forthright affection she showed in its wake, but he—he has to take hope where he can. Even if what rings in his ears is her taut whisper: “Grandfather.”

The shock has uncovered partial truths about them both. Yes, he is sick. Worse than. Strange, how you can crawl along for months, a few inches from the edge, and yet forget the precipice, as long as no one makes you look. It is not the same cliff for him as it is for whole people. For them, there is no reason to remember. To dread the ocean's hiss, and the howling of gulls.

For him—one push, and his eyes will burn with salt. One push, and the baked red earth gives out beneath his feet.


	2. Chapter 2

The priest sits with him on the rooftop while they wait for Berserker to return. The glittering city below is reflected in Kotomine's flat black gaze like a slime mold.

“Tell me something, Kariya,” he says. “I know you seek the Grail to satiate your father. Your loyalty is admirable. But what would you do if he didn't want it? What if it was yours, and only yours?”

“Tokiomi—”

Kotomine shakes his head. “What would you _wish_?”

 

“You've never loved someone,” Aoi says, and he reaches for her.

No: first he touches his chest. His hand like a light thrown into darkness. He is being eaten alive, and he thinks in a panic, loved, loved? Never loved? The question is so strange that he is forced to consider it seriously. Is it possible that I gave away my life for what is less than love? For love's shadow, its soft footstep—for the cavern in which love should have burned, and which instead is hollow, dripping, habitable, and cool?

Long ago, a thousand years ago and more—maggots could have swallowed his heart while he slept.

 _Then_ he reaches for her. Her neck. But he is hindered by the size of his body, and the cape of hanging flesh. He must shift the world to progress an inch. He must coordinate his own foul meat and the busy, heedless worms.

And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, he does not find purchase. His fingers claw the air.

_For you for you for you for you for what—_

Aoi has caught his wrists. Her grip is iron, and like all iron dispels enchantment. _Are you satisfied, Kariya?_

He struggles, though not murderously. On her knees, armored in moonlight, Aoi bears scant resemblance to the magus's dutiful wife, or to the student he met as a teenager. Where are her downcast eyes and formal mouth? She is a stranger—capable of impossible deeds. She pushes him down on his back and slaps him. She claws at his shirt. She slams his head on the floor. She drums her fists on his chest in a steady rhythm, weeping; and he thinks, in glad relief, There. There is my heart.

“I hate you,” he hears eventually, through the drone of pain. “What did you think you were doing? I saw you. You were going to kill me, too.”

“Kariya. What is it you think you're doing?”

He begins to lose consciousness. Someone is laughing in the gallery above them. In falling back, Kariya's head struck Tokiomi's shoulder—his head is cradled in the crook of Tokiomi's arm, like a young child's.

 

When he comes to Aoi is dragging him toward her car. Away from the body. Away from the church. She seems utterly absorbed in the task: she gives little grunts of effort, but makes no other sound. It rained earlier in the evening and the wet scrapes through his pantsleg. The sidewalk tears at his sneakers with an oiled whetstone's cry. He tries to stand, and she screams and lets him fall; then looks at him, bitterly, caught in her act of grace.

He stares up for a moment, thinking. He closes his eyes.

“—Kariya? Kariya!”

Aoi hesitates, and bites off an inappropriate word. She takes a step in an unknown direction. He thinks she will go—he can hear the roar of the gutters, full to brimming, knotted with foam. But she must only have been planting her feet: she leans down and lifts him gingerly, as though he were an old book.

They go on this way. She gets him into the car, and he does nothing to help her. He is half-deceiving, half-ardent; ardently helpless, his mind rolling toward the brink. He approaches the world from a changeable distance, like a drowned man, a bloated buoyant carcass: his head breaks, bends, scatters the surface, and at once disappears. The unstable shadows of buildings, flicked in and out as if in a card trick. Aoi is a timid driver, ordinarily, but on empty roads at the witching hour even she can find a turn of speed. From the back he sees just the straight cut of her hair and her hand on the wheel, folded into a beak.

It might be a dream. A memory, of the days when she was learning to drive and he would ride along with her, not quite legally. She was always so stern, frozen with nerves; she spoke to him, when he tried to distract her, in the tone of a crusty old dowager. Her clipped, high, lilting voice—he had almost forgotten how pompous Aoi could be, when afraid.

He touches the returned knowledge of it like an unearthly talisman. The command seals the priest gave him are fresh and bright, and for a moment he entertains the horrible thought that this, all of this, is the result of some use of them. That he ordered the world and it in its madness obeyed. But he does not believe... curiously, alone in a dead man's sedan with the widow, Kariya feels as though his guilt has lost all relevance. He feels urgent, simple curiosity about Aoi: not the fear that filled him when he thought of her and Rin, trapped on Tohsaka's estate, but disinterested wonder at her ongoing forbearance. She thinks he killed her husband. She's taking him—where?

She is taking him home.

She pulls up at the gate in front of the Matou household. She gets out and opens the door for him, like a suitor. In the ten minutes it took to drive from the church to his father's land, he oozed into a sitting position and almost managed to wrestle his seatbelt on, but he now releases the buckle with a faint, apologetic _clank._

He says, “When I found him, he was already dead.”

Aoi gestures sharply for him to get out. When he does, she turns her face to one side, like the queen on an English coin. Minted from night.

“You don't believe me,” he says. “I know. Why didn't you—” Anything. She could have called the police. She, of all people, is not constrained by the laws of this war.

He still wants to kill her. The glassy bloom of violence—in the moment, it seemed to have risen out of nowhere. It should have faded as completely. Instead it lingers like weakness, or the toxic secretions of the worms.

“You're my oldest friend,” says Aoi, with disgust. She starts to get back into the car.

“Wait. Wait!” His serenity is flagging. When it was only a question of what she would do to him, he had been happy in the knowledge that no outcome could matter. But now, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpses a disaster not yet born. “You should come in. Sakura will be there. She might even be awake...”

This is the complete picture: a grey man, a corroded statue, pleading with a woman of flesh and blood. Her breath comes in blurred fat rhombuses, softly colored by the streetlamp overhead. But her reply could have been drawn from the deep mouth of a well with a stone.

She also sounds tired. “Sakura isn't my daughter."

“And Tokiomi isn't your husband,” Kariya says. “Dead, dead, dead. This isn't between the Tohsakas and the Matous. There's no one left for that. Aoi, if she stays here—”

“Do you think I dare?” Aoi says, looking at him almost gently. “What shall I do? I'm not a magus. Should I spirit her away from Zouken, without even a husband to protect us? Not that he would have, and not that—I met your father once. You remember.”

“Just come in. Let her see you. I'll take care of the rest.”

“I wish you could understand.”

“Please.” Pain bursts along the plane of his jaw. He slaps at the network of veins, feels them surge up and rewrite themselves; he says, “For god's sake, help her.”

But something has collapsed in Aoi. She rips his hand from car's roof and shuts the door. He watches her strap herself in, and adjust her shoulders; watches her gasp, suddenly, and press her open mouth to the back of her hand. Her features crumple. When she recovers her composure she rolls down the window, although her eyes are directed straight ahead, three-quarters profile a sheer drop. “Maybe you can do it yourself,” she says. “Or maybe you can't. God knows, the word of the Matous is past redeeming. But Kariya—don't contact me again. I've done as much as I can for you. Now, I have to tend to my own ruins.”

Her gaze slides back to him. He steps backward, more or less involuntarily, and she drives away.

 

Zouken isn't in the house. He isn't on the grounds, or in the garage, or in the pit. Kariya can sense his father, these days, and his father has always been able to detect _him—_ but there's nothing. Not a dark cloud in the sky.

The spasm of hope almost drives him to his knees. How can Zouken not be here? For as long as Kariya can remember, Zouken has crouched in the manor like the stone in a tarnished ring. If Zouken is somewhere out there, in the city, then the world has changed. It must be the woman—the homunculus, who contains the Grail. Dead by now. Zouken will try and retrieve it himself, perhaps. Kariya doesn't even know where the priest took her body.

He does find Byakuya, sprawled out on the kitchen table with one hand wrapped in layers of tape. “ _You_ ,” Byakuya shrieks, pushing himself up with his good hand. Then he collapses, blubbering. “That man—if you hadn't—kidnapping, Kariya, and torture—”

“Calm down,” Kariya says. He has to work to enunciate. “What happened to you?”

“A man in black,” Byakuya says, “with a gun—he said his name was Emiya Kiritsugu.”

Saber's Master. So the ruse with Berserker didn't work, or not for long.

“Who tied up your hand?” Kariya asks. The growing spot of blood is red and crisp-edged as a pansy.

“Sakura, of course. I haven't seen Zouken since—come to think of it, he left right after you did. God, I hate that old man!”

“Ah, brother, if only you had told me earlier.”

Kariya limps out without hearing Byakuya's snarled retort. “Sakura,” he calls.

“I'm here.”

She's perched at the top of the stairs down to the basement. She wasn't there a few minutes ago, he knows, but she is so still and so pale that she might have been carved from the same greenish rock. It does seem to him that they have been in this place since the day it was raised. They were here before Zouken. They were here when the vaults were warm.

But that's nonsense, of course. Only now is it the two of them, alone together, with the city beyond encroaching on these arrogant foundations.

She says, “I heard voices.”

“Byakuya?”

She ducks her head in what would, on another young girl, be a gesture of acquiescence, but which on her looks more like a brief challenge. With some consternation he realizes that he does know who Aoi reminded him of in her anger, after all. “No,” Sakura says. “Before that.”

He can't answer her. Aoi's face flashes before his eyes as it appeared behind glass, colorless and overlaid with his own rotten image. Her grief, like grainy footage of an explosion—the rush of color, the rising surge of red.

He says, “Grandfather isn't here.”

She hesitates for so long that he wonders if she's heard him. Is he standing there in front of her? Or is he—somewhere else, on his back and in chains, the taste of her life like oil on his tongue. “Sakura,” he says, “if you go with me, I promise—”

She turns around so quickly it must hurt. “What if he finds us,” she says, soft; and then, “Do we have to come back?”

“No,” Kariya says. He picks her up off the stairs, taking both her hands. “He will not. And we don't.”

They walk out the front gate, in the end. They don't take anything; there's neither time nor any point. As they make their way toward the train station, joy covers Kariya like a shroud. Much of his life has been spent sleeping out of doors, and he remembers one occasion, not long after he left home, when he piled fallen leaves atop his bedroll, in a private fortune. Raining gold. He mischaracterized escape, thinking of it as an act of courage. It is something to be brave; but it's something better, something stranger, to receive happiness without warning—happiness carried down on a dry wind. Zouken is gone. The priest betrayed him. The Grail will never be his. Tokiomi—

He is only now realizing that Aoi saved his life.

 

The next day, he discovers that she also wired him money. He doesn't really understand how much.

He writes to some of his old professional contacts: fellow journalists, mostly, asking about a place to stay. He and Sakura took an overnight bus to Tokyo with the last of his savings. Now there's a bit of a buffer; he checks them into a ritzy hotel, for no better reason than that Sakura is entranced by the ornate facade. It's a trick that he picked up as a reporter—the higher-end the establishment, the less likely they are to question stinking hoodies and ghoulish disfigurement. And the more likely they are to have prior experience with his surname.

Still, he almost doesn't make it past the ID check, and afterwards he slumps down at the suite's rosewood desk and lets his apprehensions simmer. How much time does he have left? What exactly did Aoi's mercy preserve? A fortnight at most. More likely, a few days. Berserker is shortening his time; even unmanifested, Kariya can feel the burning drag on his circuits. Moreover, for as long as Berserker lives, he will remain a target for the other, surviving Masters. The war is almost done.

He should have thought about this earlier. Not only in order to plan for it, but because earlier he might not have found his thoughts melting away from the problem like wax around flame. He has his command seals; he can order Berserker to kill himself, though it will mean losing what little ability to protect Sakura he has. A week isn't nearly enough to get her situated, but if one of his friends—one of the ones he trusts—comes through, he can explain...

He has to admit to himself that, at this rate, she's likely to end up in an orphanage. But Aoi might, _must_ change her mind, so if he leaves Sakura with means of contacting Aoi, and makes sure that Sakura can stay out of Zouken's reach, then all is not unsalvageable. And one of his friends might come through for her, too, on the promise of money.

He'll buy contacts. And hair dye. He'll open an account for her, somehow, or a trust.

He'll die, he'll die, he'll die.

He keeps thinking that Sakura will grow restless. When she coughs, or hums, he assumes she's about to ask him to take her to a new, unexplored, _Tokyo_ park; or else just to play with her. But she sits in an overstuffed armchair and draws on her coloring book, taking an impressionistic approach to the precise black lines. She handles room service when he forgets to eat. She doesn't ask about her mother.

Kariya would much rather be beaten. It's not an expression; he finds himself frankly craving the hard, specific reproach of a blow. When Zouken lashed out with his cane, it was like being boarded up in a wall—such noise from the hammer! Such a haphazard narrowing of safety. But at least in the darkness there was nothing to do but stay. And there was all that percussive injury to focus on—the almost soothing outwardness of pain. Not like the worms, which could fracture the mind but never drown it out.

This is different. He is free, and the sky in the window is as blue as his blind eye, and with no constraint on his actions, no great cage to strive against—he feels his life trickling out. A tiny puncture, at the base of his spine, and when he turns in his chair he sees the waste as if it were water: a long, shining trail of a spill, winding along the sidewalk, over skeletal train-tracks. In its bunched silver surface hangs a forest of lost days. His senses have taken on a muted roughness, whereby the pain is queasy, ignorable, more constant than consuming. An object lodged beneath him. He takes a shower and climbs back into his clothes and feels their brittle rasp against clean skin.

“I'm sorry we stayed cooped up here all day,” he tells Sakura, when the room has stopped spinning, and the walls no longer quiver like the air over a furnace. “Uncle needed to rest. But tomorrow...”

Sakura is standing by his bed. Her chin barely comes up to the top of the side, but she looks down at him as from some much greater distance. Her face is thoughtful and cold, and yet he believes that she is in some turmoil. Has she figured out that her future is a snake, twisting in the hand? He's offered her, not freedom, but an eternity of flight.

Don't lose hope, he mouths. There is still more I can do. Let me do as much as I can, and then...

She says something. Her finger raised in professorial strictness: _listen, sir_. But Kariya can't hear it. He is already asleep.

 

The dream is red, as they have been since Berserker was summoned. Knacker's-yard red. But Berserker looks different. He has fallen to his knees.

“...sacrifice...” he murmurs, and Kariya wonders whether Berserker, too, is having trouble coming to terms with Kariya's change of course. After that long fight to destroy himself, in the right way, with casualties—it's maddening to discover that what he needs is time.

Berserker lifts his head. “Come,” he says; and unwillingly, unhopefully, Kariya does.

He waits for the mailed fist around his throat, or the chain and the mace. He might turn nostalgic over Zouken's stick, but Berserker's attacks are another thing. In the dreams, he is not quite the husk he is in life. He feels with the old coherence, and the old plain clarity; the raw black streak of the madman's fits transports him, not away from his filth, but inward, down and deep. He changes when Berserker strikes him. He becomes merely afraid.

But Berserker turns the bleeding slit toward him without comment. When the iron gauntlets move, it is not to wrench at Kariya's head, but rather to adjust something—about the visor—

“Who are you?” Kariya asks, despite himself, and the helmet shatters.

The face behind it is gaunt and sleepless. The teeth come to absurd little points. And now the hands do rise, to draw him down.

Berserker, his Servant, kisses him on the forehead. A fast, vindictive press of the mouth; a humid touch of air.

 

He's still dreaming. The colors have changed.

He is riding a gray destrier, his hair an inky flag. Where is this, Kariya wonders, looking out at a vista of—

—green fields, white skies, a squat fortress—

—tents and pavilions in the field, the outbursts of a merry court; the king and queen, seated on wooden thrones—

The king, Kariya recognizes. Saber's most distinctive feature is her tightly-plaited blond hair, but during the war Kariya paid more attention to her eyes: that calenture of hot blue-green, so like dead Tokiomi's. Hard and clear as water, if water viewed from a height. Ermine does little to disguise her skinny frame. She has linked hands with a woman who Kariya supposes must be Guenevere, although it's hard to believe that any English queen bore such a marked resemblance to Justeaze Lizrich von Einzbern. Berserker must be feeding more recent memories into the fabric of the dream. Kariya thinks of the homunculus, limp and wan in Berserker's grasp. Even now, there's no real scrape of guilt; he has traveled too far alone for that. What he feels is closer to regret. Enough, he wants to cry, isn't this enough? Just the queen, smiling down at him; the king extending a bare hand. The day is not even halfway done, and noon burns gold as grave-goods through the fog.

But the dream goes on. He sees snippets of the affair, and of Arthur's proud blindness; he learns, without choosing to, the goose-neck arch of Guenevere's wrists, and the warm cut of her mouth. The city and the silence two can build behind a wall of fair hair. He does his best not to connect her varnished stoicism with Aoi. He sees Arthur, always Arthur, his friend and his king, striding away in a swirl of velvet that chokes both confessions and pleas.

Kariya, trapped in Lancelot's pain, thinks scornfully that nothing Saber is warrants his penance. Saber hunts pure abstractions, and guards her legacy with more fastidiousness than she does her wife.

His suspicions are only confirmed when Mordred's faction brings matters to a head, and Saber sentences Guenevere to the stake. The rabble, Tokiomi said, before he burned Kariya. Fire and nobility are close bedfellows. But Lancelot—Lancelot will save—

Then, without any kind of transition, Kariya is on the battlefield with Arthur.

He doesn't understand it. Was Lancelot there, when Arthur died? For there is no mistaking Mordred, a wisp at the head of the opposing army. Why is this what follows? What happened to the queen?

He looks to the woman fighting beside him. The sky is orange, flaming to blacken, and the dust roils and answers the stalactites of the clouds. Mud has spattered her night-blue skirt and vest of mail, and her face, too, is not unscathed, not as clean and impervious as he would have believed. A smear of mud rides her jaw. Drying gore nets the white-gold hair.

She's a child, he thinks, stricken.

It's not true. It's impossible; he's seen her live through the same accelerated thirty years as he has. But she has not aged, and what were to the un-knighted Lancelot the stern features of an adult king, a fair young man, have become terribly innocent—now that Lancelot and Kariya's perspectives are aligned. When did she receive Avalon? Fifteen? Sixteen? The soft curve of her cheek, covered in down. She falls to her knee and he instinctively throws out an arm to support her. What must it have been like, he wonders, to be fifteen while Guenevere and Lancelot grew grey; while they complained, cavorted, loved and fell apart? For he remembers now, fuzzily, that the romance ran out when they were accused. Lancelot saved her, but she went to a convent, and sold her crown. She refused him a last kiss.

He is dying still. Somehow the knowledge has chased him even here; or else Lancelot's doom is conspiring with his hindbrain. It strikes him, this time, as torrential nakedness. The stripping away of all speechless desire. Desire is armor: it extends, makes assertive, any cringing lump of self. What is left behind it? His pains, layered up in a sedimentary wall of ache on savage ache. His loneliness.

A child king, beside him.

He helps her to her feet. She looks at him with the eyes that are like Tokiomi's, and also like Rin's, and which once would have reminded him of Sakura, although that time is gone. She takes both his arms at the elbow, frowning. The battle rages in a staged wide curve around the hill. “You weren't here, were you?” she murmurs.

“This is all my fault,” Kariya hears himself say, and shakes with Berserker's fury. In his ears, the voice that stripped his sleep for two weeks: Curse me, Arthur. Kill me. For once, be weak.

But Kariya is detached from all that. Maybe Berserker meant this as a punishment, a last torment before the command seals are used up. But Kariya is interested in the remote young face, which shows few outward symptoms of a life of suffering. He feels a last emergence of compassion; compassion for a stranger, like the afterimage of a blazing light.

“I forgive you,” Arthur says, letting go. It makes Lancelot weep. But Kariya, smiling through some pain—empty, relieved, far from the sorrow that others had planned for him—nearly victorious, Kariya wakes.


End file.
